Mindhunters 4 - Deadly Intent (34 page)

In the end, though, she slept. They both did. He came awake before dawn, aware that she was trembling violently against him, her breathing labored. He skated a hand over her stomach, soothing. Could feel the skin beneath the pajama top quivering beneath his touch. “Nightmare?” His face pressed to her hair, he could feel her nod.

A sense of helplessness filled him. “Mace, where’d you go yesterday? After Chicago?”

For a time he thought she wouldn’t answer. When she did, her voice was barely audible. “Terre Haute.”

He frowned in the darkness, his mind searching for the thread of familiarity. “Castillo is confined there.”

“He told Adam he had more information, details that would help the case that he’d give only to me.” The words were so thready he had to lean closer to hear. “We both agreed he was lying. Trying to arrange a meet and using the case as a lever.”

He tended to agree. “So why go?”

She was quiet for a long time. “Because in the end, I couldn’t be sure what was stopping me, disbelief or fear. And I decided long ago I wasn’t going to let fear rule my life.”

The pieces still weren’t coming together for him. “That case? The one you worked that involved Castillo . . .”

Her breath streamed out in a long sigh. “I didn’t work a case. Castillo was working with the men who kidnapped my stepfather and me when I was eight.”

Kell stilled, the news hitting him with the force of a vicious right jab. And then comprehension crowded in, making bile rise in his throat. He remembered what Castillo was. What he’d been imprisoned for.

“Ian was stationed in the British embassy in Bogotá. We’d been there eight months when we were walking home from the park one Saturday. An enclosed jeep pulled to a stop beside us and men with rifles poured out of it.

“We were blindfolded, but I could hear them fighting with Ian, hitting him until he was slumped over me, quiet. I still don’t know where they took us. A sort of barn, I think, far out into the country. We were kept separated and there were more children there, all of us kept in individual cages, bound and gagged. They took turns guarding us and I remember the first night when Castillo went on duty. He had kind eyes, I thought. Maybe he liked little kids.”

Her voice went flat. “And I was right. He especially liked little girls.”

His chest was too tight. It was a struggle to haul oxygen into his lungs. “He raped you?”

“He’d choose a different child every night. Only the girls. There were eight of us held there. Three boys. It was like a game with him. He’d walk up and down between our cages, talking about our various . . . attributes. Stop in front of one door. Move slowly to the other. And afterward . . . each time afterward, he’d stop by my cage. I’d be curled up in a ball, trying not to see, to hear anything. But I’d always hear him. ‘I’m saving you for last, my little English rose.’ I spent all my time certain my turn would be next. Hating myself for being glad it wasn’t. That it never came.”

The vise in his chest squeezed painfully. There was a fire in his gut that threatened to devour him. A thirst for revenge for a long-ago crime committed against helpless children. A crime no life sentence could ever pay.

“We were ransomed after a week. All the diplomats paid for the insurance, because the kidnappings happened too frequently. I never knew Castillo’s name until I saw his face in the newspaper when the story of Raiker’s case broke. I contacted Adam, told him what I knew, and he arranged to have me testify.”

There was no emotion in her voice. But he felt it in the shudders that still shook her body at occasional intervals. “What was he waiting for? Men like him . . . they aren’t good at overcoming their urges.”

“I never knew. Never had a clue why those poor girls were savaged night after night and I was spared. But now I think I do. Five million dollars, he said. I don’t think the others knew what he was doing at night. He was probably afraid he’d mess up the payoff if I was . . . damaged.”

She pulled away then and he let her go. Rolled to his back and tried to beat back the emotion that was teeming and rolling inside him, battling for a way out.

But it was useless, all of it. There was no way to undo the terror that Macy had gone through. No way to undo the psychological damage, a form of survivor’s guilt that must have ravaged her for years afterward.

Nothing to do with the rage that frothed and foamed inside him at the thought of the cruel shattering of innocence.

When she didn’t return to the bed, Kell felt a sense of foreboding. He grabbed his glasses from the bedside table and put them on, getting up to pad to the bathroom door. Listened, and when he heard no sound, pushed it open with the palm of his hand.

She was leaning her palms on the counter, the fingers clenching the edge so tightly that her knuckles shone white. And when he saw her expression in the mirror, a sense of déjà vu struck him hard.

He’d seen that look before. She’d worn it after their one night together when she’d told him it would never happen again. Dismissing him, and their time together, with an ease that should have come as a relief.

He’d spent a lot of time in the intervening months telling himself he felt exactly that. But that lie had been exposed as soon as Macy had walked on that jet a few days ago and sat down at Raiker’s other side. Relief was the last thing he was feeling. Then or now.

“Don’t do it again.” He’d meant the words as a demand. Had no idea why they sounded so much like a plea. “I know what you’re thinking. That what you revealed leaves you vulnerable, and now it’s time to draw back, rebuild your defenses or whatever.” Hell, he should be familiar with the ploy. He’d invented it. “Don’t.”

“You should leave. Before any of the others wake up.”

He hated her flat tone. The deliberately blanked expression. And he’d do about anything to rid her of it.

Kell started unbuttoning his shirt. Her eyes widened, and she swung around, taking a step back. “Are you crazy? What are you doing?”

He tore it off to clench it in one fist while he pointed to his scar with the other. “You asked about this, remember? The night we spent together. Didn’t see it because you didn’t want lights, but you felt it and asked me about it.”

Memory flickered in her eyes, and her expression softened. Her gaze moved over him, lingering on the old injury, and he felt his skin heat. “I lied to you then,” he said bluntly. And watched her gaze flash to his.

“You said you were shot on the job. When you were working undercover for the BPD.”

“I got it when I was seventeen. A couple days home after I got out of juvie. Carrie . . . my mother, shot me.” He steeled himself for the horror, the pity, the avid interest. The lie was infinitely easier than dealing with any of them, which is why he’d gotten in the habit of telling it.

But he wasn’t prepared for her to close the distance between them. Put her soft palm against the old scar as if to heal it all over again.

He forced himself to continue. The story was ancient history, better off unsaid, but she’d stripped her vulnerabilities bare for him, and he knew she’d hate him for that. So he reciprocated. His story was more pathetic than tragic, so they were hardly equal.

“Seems she spent the six months of my lockup searching for my stash of money. Pretty damn pissed when she couldn’t get at it, too. I had it in a lockbox at a bank. She’d found the key but had no idea which bank it was.” A corner of his mouth kicked up, and he looked down at her. “I like to think that drove the crazy old bat nuts while I was in juvie.” Although she hadn’t seemed crazy. Drunk or stoned most of the time he spent with her, but not crazy.

“First time I went home I was going to get that key and find myself a different place to live. But she already had it, along with the gun.” No reason to mention that the gun was his, too. Living that life, in that neighborhood, it had been a necessity. He lifted a shoulder. “She demanded the money; I told her to go to hell.” His hand came up to cover hers as the wound throbbed with a phantom pain. “Close range, I was hard to miss. The bitch nicked my heart. Damn near killed me.” In masterful understatement, he added, “We don’t exchange Christmas cards.”

His hand tightened around hers, and their eyes met. “The thing is, Macy, I don’t know where she is. I don’t care. And if I knew, I wouldn’t try to find her, wouldn’t stir up that old poison. There’s no point. What’s in our past is the past. It’s a part of us, but it doesn’t define us.”

Understanding lit her eyes. “Poison,” she murmured. “Yes, that’s what Castillo was after. Taking the chance to spread a little more pain. But if the past has too tight a hold, it’s important to face it, isn’t it? To prove, at least to yourself, that it
hasn’t
defined you. And that you don’t fear it. Not anymore.”

He recognized suddenly what had driven her to face Castillo. What it had cost her. And what she’d gained in return.

“You’re one of the bravest women I’ve ever met.” His throat felt full, so he cleared it. “I thought so on our first case together. Remember when we were chasing down that suspect in Louisville and he turned on us with that knife. Didn’t even have my weapon sited before you’d dropped him with one hard kick to the balls. He never saw it coming.” His eyes dropped to her mouth. Full and gently curved. “Things are always scariest when you don’t see them coming.”

She moved away then. He’d known she would. So there was no reason to experience that clutch in his heart.

A heart that stopped in the next moment when she slowly pulled her top over her head.

Lust fogged his brain. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Here, then, was the vision that had been denied him their one brief night together. As his eyes traced the curves and shadows of her torso, his palms itched to follow.

Delicate. She looked fragile somehow now that he could see the slim arms and narrow waist topped with the sweet curve of her breasts. Need clenched in his belly like a fist. She hadn’t felt fragile in his arms that night, and he hadn’t been slow and careful. But she deserved that much, to be tasted and touched and savored, every inch of her explored and exploited.

He closed the distance between them. As if of its own volition, his hand raised and his fingers entangled in her hair. Fine and baby soft, just as he remembered. His face lowered to hers. And then stopped.

Memory wasn’t necessarily selective. Thoughts of what she’d revealed earlier crowded in and summoned uncomfortably chivalrous urges. Maybe he knew her a little better than he realized. She’d avoided him for months after they’d slept together.

He wasn’t eager to repeat that.

Kell rested his forehead against hers, tried to rein in his galloping pulse. “I don’t want you to regret this.”

“The only regret I’m going to have is if you don’t quit talking.”

It was the hint of annoyance in her words that had the tension easing and his lips curving. The last thing he wanted to do was add to the lady’s regrets.

Cupping her nape in both palms, he kissed her then, long and hard. It was crazy to feel this sense of homecoming. She shouldn’t taste so familiar when their time together had been so limited. But her flavor was sprinting through his system, summoning a response that was much too swift, and a bit too desperate.

He traced the seam of her lips with the tip of his tongue before demanding entrance. There was nothing of the hesitancy he recalled from their first time. Her tongue met his in a long velvet glide that kick-started his pulse and ignited a simmering heat.

Closer. Unconsciously his arm tightened around her. He could feel her nipples pricking his chest, begging for attention. But he was determined to draw this out, make it last. And this time, if she drew away again, he’d have more of her to remember. Enough to sate his hunger for her, finally.

The thought restored his fraying restraint. He took his time, deepening the kiss, taking his fill. There was sweetness there, with an underlying wicked heat to entice him to take more. Because if there was one thing that he’d learned their first time together, it was that Macy had layers she kept well hidden. And stripping them away, one at a time, would be primitively satisfying.

He scored her bottom lip with his teeth, was rewarded by her indrawn breath. One of her hands went to his back, traced his spine in a slow, languorous sweep. Tearing his mouth from hers, he found the pulse at the base of her throat, where it beat madly, and pressed his lips against it before cruising up the slender arch of her neck.

Her fingers dipped below his waistband, tracing light rhythmic strokes across his lower back. He widened his stance, brought her hips into closer contact with his. And reveled in the sensation as the increased pressure sent sneaky little demons from hell firing through his veins.

There was a temptation to push too hard, ask for too much, too fast. He knew better now. Knew enough to lure her in, soothe her nerves before pressing for what he needed from her. A demand for everything she’d willingly give him in return. And then more. For everything she sought to hold back.

Unable to deny himself any longer, he cupped her breasts, relearning their shape and weight. Wedging a breath of space between them, he flicked his thumbs over her nipples, urging them into tighter knots. Urgency licked up his spine, sped through his veins. It was difficult to take it slow when every instinct he had was whipping his need hotter. Faster.

Giving in to those instincts, he bent to take one nipple in his mouth and was rewarded by her sharply drawn-in breath. Her hands moved to his biceps, nails biting lightly, and the slight sting of pain only fanned the urgency higher. He lashed the taut bud with his tongue, gratified by her low moan.

It had seemed too easy for her these last months. Simple for her to forget the hours they’d spent wrapped around each other. Which had maddened him, because he hadn’t been able to shrug it off so quickly. He had his share of experiences. Welcomed a woman who didn’t try to throw strings over every roll in the sheets. But it didn’t take a wealth of experience to recognize that Macy wasn’t the sort of woman to take intimacy lightly.

Maybe that’s why it had burned when she’d seemed to do just that.